Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category

Pine, Julián M.; Lieven, Elena; Rowland, Caroline F.

doi:10.1515/ling.1998.36.4.807

Cited by 155 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…MOSAIC is therefore often regarded as a usage-based model of language learning (cf. Goldberg, 1995;Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997;Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998;Tomasello, 2000;, MacWhinney, 2004. However, although the mechanisms implemented in MOSAIC are certainly consistent with a usage-based analysis, it is important to recognise that MOSAIC is a relatively simple distributional analyser, with no access to semantic information, which is not sufficiently powerful to acquire many aspects of adult syntax.…”

Section: An Alternative Account Of Optional Infinitive Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

et al. 2015

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Section: An Alternative Account Of Optional Infinitive Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

et al. 2015

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“…Lieven, 2008;Pine & Lieven, 1997;Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998). In the literature, there has traditionally been a dichotomy between those who argue for lexically specific learning and those who argue that children are generalising across specific instances, extracting verb-and construction-general information about the regularities of their language from early on.…”

Section: Competing Constructions 26mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…where's X going), they will use these patterns in their production (see Pine et al, 1998) and they will be faster (Bannard & Matthews, 2008) and more accurate (Theakston, Lieven, Pine & Rowland, 2005;Rowland, 2007) at using them. However, this does not prevent the learner from generalising across them on the basis of shared commonalities in form and meaning, extracting relevant cues such as word order cues and applying them across construction boundaries.…”

Section: Competing Constructions 26mentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Rowland¹,

Noble²,

Chan³

2014

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

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Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present three experimental studies, all of which focus on the acquisition of the syntactic function of word order as a marker of the Theme-Recipient relation in ditransitives (form-meaning mapping). In Study 1 we investigated how quickly English children acquire form-meaning mappings when there are two competing structures in the language. We demonstrated that English speaking 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, correctly interpreted both prepositional and double object datives, assigning Theme and Recipient participant roles on the basis of word order cues. There was no advantage for the double object dative despite its greater frequency in child directed speech. In Study 2 we looked at acquisition in a language which has no dative alternation -Welsh -to investigate how quickly children acquire form-meaning mapping when there is no competing structure. We demonstrated that Welsh children (Study 2) acquired the prepositional dative at age 3 years, which was much earlier than English children. Finally, in Study 3 we examined bei2 (give) ditransitives in Cantonese, to investigate what happens when there is no dative alternation (as in Welsh), but when the child hears alternative, and possibly competing, word orders in the input. Like the English 3-yearolds, the Cantonese 3-year-olds had not yet acquired the word order marking constraints of bei2 ditransitives. We conclude that there is not only competition between cues but competition between constructions in language acquisition. We suggest an extension to the competition model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) whereby generalisations take place across constructions as easily as they take place within constructions, whenever there are salient similarities to form the basis of the generalisation.Competing constructions 3

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“…The bulk of these studies is that young children, in contrast to older children, tend to re-use the ungrammatical structure modelled by the experimenter in their own productions, a finding which is interpreted as attesting to children's lack of productivity with word order. The constructivist framework proposes that word order develops from lexically specific schemas formed around frequent verbs, i.e., lexical units that are relatively consistently ordered (Pine et al, 1998), and only slowly generalizes, around 3 or 4 years old, to an abstract representation independent of the verbs.…”

Section: The Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

Franck

Lassotta

2012

Lingua

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One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children’s early grammatical knowledge. This paper focuses on the early representation of word order. It questions the validity of the results obtained with the Weird Word Order methodology (Akhtar,1999) inwhichchildrenare presented with un grammatical sentences. These results have previously been considered as major evidence for the constructivist,usage-based approach to word order development according to which young children initially encode word order as a verb-specific lexical property which only slowly develops into abstract knowledge at age 3 or 4 (e.g., Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007). The critical review presented here addresses various problems with the results and their interpretation. The discussion questions the relationship between theory and data as well asmethodological issues related to thesm all number of observations and the discarding of data not missing at random. It is argued that the data not only fail to support the constructivist account, but they actually bring evidence for the alternative hypothesis according to which children, from early on, represent word order abstractly

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Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category

Abstract: In this study data from the first six months of 12 children's multiword speech were used to test the validity of Valians (1991) syntactic performance-limitation account andTomasello's (1992)

Cited by 155 publications

References 30 publications

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

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